New survey data shows that Notre Dame’s legendary president Father Theodore Hesburgh’s wisdom for college presidents from 55 years ago is still relevant today.
“My basic principle is that you don’t make decisions because they are easy; you don’t make them because they are cheap; you don’t make them because they’re popular; you make them because they’re right,” he advised.
Fresh polling data from approximately 100 college and university presidents in attendance at the Yale Higher Education Leadership Summit reveals that higher education leaders are no longer cowering as their schools are wrongly exploited as scapegoats for political grandstanding. Challenges to higher education posed by the new Trump administration (as well as from the far left and right of the political spectrum) include misguided assaults on admissions policies, educational curricula, endowment support, research priorities, and freedom of expression. Leaders view this attacks as dangerous distortions of facts. Now, higher ed leaders are developing shared plans to correct critics with renewed confidence and clarity. Whether they lead prestigious Ivy League schools, prominent large state universities, proud HBCUs, principled faith-based colleges, selective liberal arts colleges, fortified private universities, or pragmatic community colleges, higher education leaders are not cowering to calls for “institutional neutrality”—but are instead coming out swinging. Increasingly, college and university presidents are saying that this is not the time for such leadership cowardice and are using their voices, despite some boards mistakenly wanting to silence them.
Read more at Yale Insights.
